US News & World Report: What If There Was a Sequester and Nobody Cared?

President Barack Obama “bungled” his campaign against the sequester because no one outside of the Washington, D.C., axis of government and lobbyists seems to care about the federal spending cutbacks, according to a commentary in U.S. News & World Report.

Moreover, his doomsday warnings about how the cuts would eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs and curb economic growth now seem exaggerated, the magazine said, at least for the time being.

Until that changes, “Obama needs to validate his prior warnings without sounding like a killjoy who actually wants the economy to tank, just to prove he was right and buttress his case for more government spending. That's not what Americans are really looking for right now,” U.S. News said.

Polls continue to show a majority of Americans believe the government is too big or is doing too much.

A recent Pew Research poll showed 53 percent of Americans think the government represents a threat to their personal freedom. Polls by Gallup and Reuters show Obama’s approval rating has sunk below 50 percent for the first time in 2013, and that voters are not impressed with his handling of the sequester.

And a new ABC/Washington Post poll said 61 percent of Americans favor reductions on the scale of the $85 billion in sequester cuts that are already taking place.

According to U.S. News, “Obama seems to be pandering to Americans' sense of entitlement rather than outlining tough choices that might hurt a little bit now but will improve the nation's finances and the soundness of the economy.”

The New Yorker chimed in on the same topic: “Now that the sequester has taken effect, many of those gloomy promises have not come true, or they have been debunked altogether, leading some Democrats to publicly fret about the Administration overplaying its hand and forcing itself into a weaker negotiating position.”

The New Yorker noted that White House tours are being cancelled as of this coming Saturday, because of the sequester. The magazine concluded there are “legitimate reasons to suspect that the move was less about cost cutting than it was about political strategy.”

In an apparent tit-for-tat move, Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tex., introduced a bill that would eliminate funding for transporting the president to play golf as long as the tours remain shut down.

Against claims Obama is exaggerating the economic impact of sequestration, The Christian Science Monitor reported his prediction for the loss of 750,000 jobs as a result of the cuts might actually be accurate.

The Monitor said private economists at Capital Economics, Microeconomic Advisers and Bank of America Merrill Lynch all agreed the job losses could eventually approach that 750,000 total, which was an estimate originally issued by the Congressional Budget Office.